What, You Never Heard of a Noise Emitting Diode Before?

From the earliest days of my career in electrical engineering, I have noticed that engineers have a penchant for naming things. Names like Hewlett-Packard, Wang, and Rand Corp. have obvious etymologies, but others can be somewhat obscure or subject to cultural sensitivities. Obscure names for companies like Accenture, Ampire, and n*Ask, seem to be on the rise. So what is an “accenture” -- an accent, a venture?

Other names that are now ubiquitous in the public landscape may have turned out differently in an earlier generation: Microsoft might have been a lingerie company; Yahoo and Google could have been “girly” magazines; and FireFox would likely have been banned by PETA.

Strangely enough, Compaq Computer actually made computers that were compact; Bell Labs did research related to things with bells (telephones); International Business Machines (IBM) internationally sold business machines; and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) made advanced micro devices. One could make the case that company names are driven more by marketing types than by engineers, so let’s explore names that arise within the field of hardware design.

Thirty years ago, I was developing a high-speed image memory plane. In order to “pipeline” writes to the memory and prevent flicker on the display, there were two banks in the memory plane. When one was being displayed, the other was being written to. When writes were complete, the display was “ping-ponged” to the other bank. The signal that gave the status that this transition was about to occur was aptly named PPP (ping-pong pending). One of my early successes as a hardware design engineer was selling that name to the lead engineer.

Later, I worked on a team that developed interface boards that adhered to the VME Bus standard. Every read and write cycle was completed by asserting the DTACK (DaTa ACKnowledge) signal. The timing was a “pain in the rear,” hence the name “DTACK” would have been memorable (if you get my “point”).

Another issue that we had with the VME bus standard was that, although there was a priority scheme that VME bus masters used to adjudicate priority, there was no way to tell exactly when a bus master would relinquish the bus after a higher-priority bus master requested priority.

Given the nature of our system, my old boss, Bob Buxton, thought it wise to implement all bus masters in a manner that would limit how many transfers they could do in one bus priority request interval. He chose 32 transfers (128 bytes) for the size of these “Buxton Blocks,” as we soon nicknamed them. Fifteen years later, I was debugging some built-in test equipment (BITE) code and ran across the term “Buxton Blocks” in the comments… definitely gave me a chuckle after all those years.

I think every hardware designer has had the experience of overdriving a zener diode, thereby creating a NED (noise emitting diode). When I was at Georgia Tech, someone in the switching lab used a capacitor with too low a voltage rating in his power supply. The loud “POP!” gave us the impression that he had created a very efficient signal-to-noise converter.

Think back over your own career and see what funny names you recall using in your own designs. Who says engineers don’t have a sense of humor?

While working for a large ATE company we had to get a customer to signoff on a 'high speed data link'. 12 bit parallel . Their spec for the port software and cable set / whole system - was to have xxx number of block transfers without having a "non detectable" error.

I got it signed off after I got it installed and running for 2 weeks. It ran when requested and used on three shifts. I asked them to to sign or show me the 'non detectable error' and there was an IT guy that signed it off. The test guys were still wondering what they were thinking of when writing the spec.

A green LED shining orange (just an error in the decimal point - 0.2 instead of 0.02 A). The effect was repeatable with this LED but not reproducible with others: they tended to emit a short flash of light when the bond wire blew.

Hello, as an intern 35 years ago when LEDs where quite new, we managed to get multiple RED LEDs to emit yellow light. The trick was to drive them with a programmable power supply set for 12V and 2.5A short circuit current. (Some experimenting with exact values needed and each batch of LEDs were slightly different.)

The record was one LED than literally burned for 3 weeks. One problem was that powering off disabled forever the short that glowed in the dark.

And yes, the LED did make a loud noise - once - when subjected to this treatment. Two inventions in one;, NED and first generation incandescent light source.

In 1979, after we developed a way to use spare rows and columns of memory cells to replace defective cells in a DRAM, we needed a name for the technique. I favored Faulty Array Repair Technique, but for some reason, Bell Labs management would not approve that name!

Long ago, I worked on a product line that required a phasing cable to be calculated, cut and installed. The guys had a long formula of degrees/360, frequency, cable velocity constant, speed of light and conversion to inches they had to type into a hand calculator every time. I reduced it down for them to a single value*degrees or something like that. They called the value "Poole's Constant".

We always referred to added components as "dead bugs" as the leaded components were adhered to the board or another component with the top of the package toward the board, and resembled a deceased bug with its legs in the air. Luckily I was never involved on a design where the dead bugs needed their own bill of materials.

The first prototype hardware PCBs usually required 'barnacles' - little leaded components that get soldered onto the PCB to fix glitches and rectify design oversights, much as marine barnacles grow on the hulls of sea-going ships.

We had a separate Bill of Materials for the barnacles, so we naturally called this the "Barnacle Bill'...